Benefits, Costs of Growth Ignore Government Jurisdiction Lines
So, which ranch are you rooting for? In Ventura County, there’s Ahmanson Ranch--a large development project near Calabasas, approved by the Ventura County Board of Supervisors in 1992 and then sued to death by Los Angeles County. Then, in Los Angeles County, there’s Newhall Ranch--a large development project near Santa Clarita, about to be approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and soon to be sued to death by Ventura County.
What’s going on here? Which ranch is good and which one is bad? Is there any way to tell? Or does it just depend on which side of the county line you’re on--period?
Well, not exactly. But it does depend on what your priorities are. And the Ahmanson-Newhall situation reveals yet again that in California, there is little incentive for neighboring local governments to work together.
Newhall was approved by the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission in December and will soon go to the Board of Supervisors. It’s a very large project--24,000 homes and a large commercial district on 12,000 acres of land owned by Newhall Land & Farming Co. Most of the traffic will stay in Los Angeles County, but Ventura County officials are concerned that it will damage the agricultural economy in the Santa Clara Valley. There are also worries about the downstream impact of the project on the Santa Clara River, the last wild river in Southern California.
In fact, Ventura County Supervisors Kathy Long and John Flynn were miffed in December when they felt that the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission didn’t give them a fair hearing. “It’s like they were saying, ‘Look, come and sue us,’ ” Flynn said at the time.
This may sound familiar to anybody who followed the approval of the Ahmanson project in 1992. Ahmanson is a much smaller project, with 3,000 housing units instead of 24,000. But in certain ways, Ventura County was equally provincial in approving it. The biggest public benefit will be permanent preservation of some 10,000 acres of open space--but almost all of it is in Ventura County. The biggest downside will be increased traffic, all of which will flow straight off the Ahmanson property across the county line into Calabasas and Woodland Hills. It wasn’t surprising when Los Angeles County sued over Ahmanson, just as Ventura County will sue over Newhall Ranch.
To understand what’s going on, you have to remember that Ahmanson was an anomaly for Ventura County while Newhall is pretty much business as usual for Los Angeles County. And you have to take into account their different philosophies. Ventura County and its cities have always pursued a limited-growth strategy. According to research that I have conducted with my colleagues at the Claremont Graduate University Research Institute, it is the only county in Southern California that has historically pursued a restrictive, Bay Area-style growth strategy. The county has also always channeled development into cities. (It’s worth noting that both the county planners and the county Planning Commission recommended against approving the Ahmanson project, and only the strong support of then-Supervisor Maria VanderKolk overturned that sentiment.)
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Los Angeles County, by contrast, has a 75-year tradition of accommodating growth in unincorporated areas. Over the decades, some of the most innovative planning in the country has been done by the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Department--but it’s been done in the context of figuring out how to let growth happen, not how to restrict it. Some of the finest suburban development projects ever built--Westlake Village, for example--were done under Los Angeles County’s supervision. And Los Angeles County has always had a “build now, incorporate later” approach. The main concern has traditionally been how to build the infrastructure required to support such projects.
Critics complain about Los Angeles County, charging that elected officials there are simply in the pockets of big developers such as Newhall. To a certain extent, this is true. Big developers are major campaign contributors in Los Angeles County. And they have tried hard to keep their raw land outside of city boundaries, reckoning that approval will be easier at the county level. If Los Angeles County operated like Ventura County, for example, Newhall Ranch would almost certainly be within the sphere of influence of the city of Santa Clarita, and the whole political dynamic surrounding the project would be different. But Los Angeles County has consistently refused to give Santa Clarita control over raw land just outside the city.
Yet you can’t let Ventura County off the hook either. By pursuing a limited-growth strategy over the years, Ventura County has increased development pressure across the county line. As open space has been preserved around Thousand Oaks and all east county cities have clamped down on residential development, urban growth has bounced over to Santa Clarita, the San Fernando Valley and Lancaster and Palmdale. Between 1980 and 1995, Ventura County added 200,000 people. Los Angeles County added almost 2 million.
When you look beyond the immediate controversy, it’s clear that the biggest item determining how you view things is not which side of the county line you live on but whether you believe every geographical area has an obligation to accommodate growth in Southern California.
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Politics aside, Los Angeles County has always maintained that belief. And there is no question that if you do believe that our region must grow, that growth is much better off in the hands of Newhall Land & Farming Co. than smaller subdividers. Newhall is a publicly traded company with enough land, resources and public accountability to produce high-quality suburban developments such as Valencia. Of course, this kind of growth does have an impact on our rural and natural landscapes--many of which, in the case of Newhall, happen to be across the county line.
Ventura County, on the other hand, has always subscribed to the view that you can suppress growth--and therefore protect open space and the environment more successfully--without creating a downside. Of course, suppressing growth does create a downside: higher housing prices, more development pressure across the county line, more suburban sprawl out in the Antelope Valley. But again, most of these downsides don’t affect current Ventura County residents. Because they’re pushed across the line, they’re somebody else’s problem.
The obvious lesson here should be that what goes around comes around. Both accommodating growth and restricting it create benefits and costs, and unfortunately those benefits and costs aren’t equitably distributed across jurisdictional lines. And neither Los Angeles County nor Ventura County have been good neighbors to each other over the years.
In part, this is because of the dramatic clash of radically different planning philosophies that butt up against one another at the county line. In part, however, it’s because there is no regional structure or mechanism that encourages localities to look beyond their own boundaries when they plan. In a way, Los Angeles and Ventura counties are guilty of the same thing: Trying to capture the benefits of a development project as they defined them, while sloughing the problems off on somebody else. So once again in the Newhall case, for better or worse, a judge will take on the role of regional planning director. It’s not an ideal solution. But until both counties are willing to take the political risk of owning up to the problems they create for the other, this is the way things will continue.
William Fulton is editor of the Ventura-based California Planning & Development Report and author of “The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles.” He is a senior research fellow at the Claremont Graduate University Research Institute.
